The data set collected from 2001 to 2008 includes a sample of all trees shrubs vines herbs grasses fern
How burning plants tell seeds to rise from the ashesin the spring following a forest fire trees that survived the blaze explode in new growth
For centuries it was a mystery how seeds some long dormant in the soil knew to push through the ashes to regenerate the burned forest.
But by the following spring when the rains arrived there was a burst of flowering plants amid the nutrient-rich ash
and charred ground In previous studies scientists had discovered that special chemicals known as karrikins are created as trees
and ash and generate this signal says Noel holder of Salk's Arthur and Julie Woodrow Chair and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
and what Khoury calls iconic U s. crops including sugar maple and wild rice. The rich assortment of U s. crop wild relatives came as something of a surprise to him
The seasonal timing of trees and insects advance too but songbirds like Parus major or the great tit lag behind.
#How trees play role in smog productionafter years of scientific uncertainty and speculation researchers at the University of North carolina at Chapel hill show exactly how trees help create one of society's predominant environmental and health concerns:
It has long been known that trees produce and emit isoprene an abundant molecule in the air known to protect leaves from oxygen damage and temperature fluctuations.
Isoprene evolved to protect trees and plants but because of the presence of nitrogen oxides it is involved in producing this negative effect on health and the environment.
We certainly can't cut down all the trees Surratt adds but we can work on reducing these man-made emissions to cut down the production of fine particulate matter.
At Aalto University a research team led by Assistant professor Hele Savin is conducting studies on crystalline silicon solar cells
and technological compatibility with the manufacturing technologies currently used by the semiconductor industry Savin explains.
According to Savin the researchers are motivated in their work by the fact that the manufacturing technology players are major corporations in the industry
One goal of the research led by Savin is to find ways to produce equally efficient solar cells using the less expensive but impure silicon rather than the more expensive purified silica.
Hele Savin has been granted major funding for this research by the European Research Council (ERC. Story Source:
#Somethings fishy in the tree of life: Largest and most comprehensive studies of fish phylogenyfishes account for over half of vertebrate species
They integrated extensive genetic and physical information about specimens to create a new tree of life for fishes.
Many different groupings are proposed in this new tree. For example tunas and marlins are both fast-swimming marine fishes with large streamlined bodies yet they appear on very different branches of the tree.
Tunas appear to be more closely related to the small sedentary seahorses whereas marlins are close relatives of flatfishes
The fish tree is the result of years of work among a collaborative team of scientists as part of the National Science Foundation-funded Euteleost Tree of Life project.
Bats naturally fly toward their destination--for example a fruit tree--in a straight line. In other words their normal flight patterns are one-dimensional
when bats arrive at a fruit tree they fly around it utilizing the full volume of space surrounding the tree.
To simulate this behavior in the laboratory--an artificial cave equipped with an array of bat-monitoring devices--the team installed an artificial tree made of metal bars
and transfer modes of microbes from the guts tongues foreheads and palms (or paws) of members of 60 American families including canines.
For humans the team looked at the tongue forehead right and left palm and fecal samples to detect individual microbial communities Dogs were sampled similarly except that fur was sampled instead of skin on the forehead
and all four paws were swabbed for bacteria in the absence of canine palms. One of the biggest surprises was that we could detect such a strong connection between their owners
The weakest relationship on body sites was the father-to-infant connection on the forehead and palms.
#Tulip tree reveals mitochondrial genome of ancestral flowering plantthe extraordinary level of conservation of the tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) mitochondrial genome has redefined our interpretation of evolution of the angiosperms (flowering plants) finds research in biomed Central's open
Compared to humans the rate is 2000 times slower--the amount of genomic change in a single human generation would take 50000 years for the tulip tree.
The rate is even slower for magnolia trees taking 130000 years for the same amount of mitochondrial genomic change.
Prof Jeffrey Palmer who led this study explained By using the tulip tree as a guide we are able to estimate that the ancestral angiosperm mitochondrial genome contained 41 protein genes 14 trna genes seven trna
A combination of high-resolution accelerator mass spectrometry carbon-14 dates and a calibration using tree growth rates showed the GMT correlation is correct.
Researchers measured tree growth by tracking annual changes in calcium uptake by the trees which is greater during the rainy season.
The amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere is incorporated into a tree's incremental growth.
and used annually fluctuating calcium concentrations evident in the incremental growth of the tree to determine the true time distance between each by counting the number of elapsed rainy seasons.
Wood ants incorporate an antimicrobial resin from conifer trees into their nests preventing microbial growth in the colony.
Chimpanzees know that trees of certain species produce fruit simultaneously and use this botanical knowledge during their daily search for fruit.
if a tree is carrying fruit then other trees of the same species are likely to carry fruit as well the researchers conducted observations of their inspections
i e. the visual checking of fruit availability in tree crowns. They focused their analyses on recordings in
which they saw chimpanzees inspect empty trees when they made mistakes. By analysing these mistakes the researchers were able to exclude that sensory cues of fruit had triggered the inspection
Instead inspection probability was predicted by a particular botanical feature--the level of synchrony in fruit production of the species of encountered trees.
The researchers conclude that chimpanzees know that trees of certain species produce fruit simultaneously and use this information during their daily search for fruit.
There is significant epidemiological and other evidence that coffee consumption reduces the risk of type 2 diabetes.
One large study indicated a 50 percent risk reduction for people who drank seven cups of coffee a day compared to those who drank only two cups a day.
I am trying to make the coffee and diabetes story as clear as possible for the public.
The evidence points to chlorogenic acids as the active ingredients in coffee that both prevent diabetes
which funded the research pointed out that coffee#due to its popularity as a beverage#is a major dietary source of these substances.
The new study sought to document the effects of various doses of a commercial green coffee extract on the blood sugar levels of 56 men and women with normal blood sugar levels.
Follow-up glucose tolerance tests showed how the green coffee extract affected their responses. There was a significant dose-response effect of the green coffee extract
and no apparent gastrointestinal side effects Vinson said. All doses of green coffee extract produced a significant reduction in blood sugar relative to the original blank glucose challenge.
The maximum blood glucose occurred at 30 minutes and was 24 percent lower than the original with the 400 mg of green coffee extract
and the blood glucose at 120 minutes was 31 percent lower. Story Source The above story is provided based on materials by American Chemical Society (ACS.
Dissolved salt levels in the groundwater of the three southernmost farm oases are now so high they endanger the long-term sustainability of date palm farming there.
Dissolved salt levels in these oases'groundwater are between 450 and 4225 milligrams per liter--a more sustainable level especially for growing date palms
technique called PALM--for Photo-Activated Localization Microscopy--the researchers have found a way to improve the collective catalytic activity of enzyme cocktails that can boost the yields of sugars for making fuels.
We're the first to use PALM to study the interplay of enzyme activity and substrate heterogeneity says Liphardt an expert in PALM technology.
This enables us to quantify how and where enzymes are binding to the cellulose. Working with cotton--a well-defined cellulosic material--as their model system the researchers applied PALM imaging in combination with a mathematical analysis they devised.
Their results showed that cellulases exhibit specificities for cellulose structures that have many different levels of organization ranging from the highly ordered to the highly disordered.
The new PALM-based technique should allow enzyme cock tails to be matched optimally to the structural organizations of particular biomass substrates such as grass
and moregenes from the family of bacteria that produce vinegar Kombucha tea and nata de coco have become stars in a project
#Researchers help unlock pine beetles Pandoras boxtwenty researchers--more than half of them Simon Fraser University graduates
A paper detailing their newly created sequencing of the mountain pine beetle's (MPB) genome will be gold in the hands of scientists trying to stem the beetle's invasion into eastern forests.
just as the mountain pine beetle has been doing to B c.'s lodgepole pines says Christopher Keeling the paper's lead author.
and as they head into jack pine forests where the defensive compounds may be different this variation could allow them to be more successful in new environments explains Keeling.
The rice grain-sized insect has already wiped out an area of B c. lodgepole pine forest five times larger than the size of Vancouver Island.
and/or microorganisms that grow in the beetle's tunnels beneath the bark of a tree explains Keeling.
This year's study sites include coastal mangroves in Central and South america. Much of Earth's population lives along coasts
Pacaya-Samiria contains large expanses of flooded palm swamps Mcdonald said. These ecosystems are potential major sources of atmospheric methane an important greenhouse gas.
Berkebile has uncovered many examples of other plant life the Puebloans might have used as a food source such as purslane pinyon nut juniper berries globemallow and even cactus.
Examples at MU 125 include pinyon nut juniper berries and cactus. -Domesticated resources: These are brought plants to the Southwest by humans
These includefor instance Washam's research points to one woodcutting area of the forest that encompassed 30 acres of felled trees in 2006.
In 2012 that same area encompassed 65 acres of felled trees. Almost half of that increase took place in the last two years.
while at VIMS and is now at the University of California Davis. Think of how vital honeybees are for pollinating tree crops or
#New diagnostic technology may lead to individualized treatments for prostate cancera research team jointly led by scientists from Cedars-Sinai Medical center
or any other cancer said Edwin M. Posadas MD medical director of the Urologic Oncology Program at Cedars-Sinai's Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute and senior author
the Nanovelcro CTC chip laser capture microdissection and whole exome sequencing said Yi-Tsung Lu MD a postdoctoral scientist at the Cedars-Sinai Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer
His enthusiasm is echoed by Leland W. K. Chung Phd director of the Urologic Oncology Research Program at the Cedars-Sinai Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute.
Cedars-Sinai researchers were supported by a Young Investigator Award and a Challenge Award from the Prostate Cancer Foundation research grants (P01 CA098912 and R01 CA122602) from the National institutes of health a Department of defense Idea
The above story is provided based on materials by Cedars-Sinai Medical center. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
In most forests the amount of carbon held in soils is substantially greater than the amount contained in the trees themselves.
when trees became established on different types of nonforested soils across the United states. In a paper published online April 1 in the Soil science Society of America Journal they looked at lands previously used for surface mining
U-M ecologist Luke Nave and his colleagues found that in general growing trees on formerly nonforested land increases soil carbon.
Collectively these results demonstrate that planting trees or allowing them to establish naturally on nonforested lands has a significant positive effect on the amount of carbon held in soils said Nave an assistant research scientist at the U-M Biological Station and in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
and trees became established are much subtler though still significant. This type of tree establishment--which has been widespread in recent decades in the northeastern United states
and portions of the Midwest--takes about 40 years to cause a detectable increase in soil carbon.
In places where trees and shrubs have encroached into native grassland soil carbon increased 31 percent after several decades according to the study.
We have increasing evidence of a decline in certain tree species as a result of the local extinction of forest elephants.
#Insect pests more plentiful in hotter parts of city than in cooler areashigher temperatures in cities can be a key driver of insect pest outbreaks on trees in urban areas according to research published March 27
The researchers found that a scale insect that exclusively feeds on oak trees was 13 times more abundant on willow oaks in the hottest parts of the city of Raleigh North carolina than in cooler areas of the same city even
In a second experiment they found scale insects collected from trees in hot areas had higher survival rates in hot greenhouses than in cool ones.
and green teas and coffee activated the highest levels of a well-known cancer-linked gene called p53.
and coffees and their impact needs to be assessed. Kern cautioned that his studies do not suggest people should stop using tea coffee
or flavorings but do suggest the need for further research. The Johns Hopkins study began a year ago
and green teas and coffee showed up to nearly 30-fold increases in p53 activity which was on par with their tests of p53 activity caused by a chemotherapy drug called etoposide.
Pyrogallol commonly found in smoked foods is also found in cigarette smoke hair dye tea coffee bread crust roasted malt
Gallic acid a variant of pyrogallol is found in teas and coffees. Kern says that more studies are needed to examine the type of DNA damage caused by pyrogallol
and soy sauces and black bean sauces showed minimal p53 effects in Kern's tests as did soybean paste kim chee wasabi powder hickory smoke powders and smoked paprika.
#Trees used to create recyclable, efficient solar cellsolar cells are just like leaves capturing the sunlight and turning it into energy.
It's fitting that they can now be made partially from trees. Georgia Institute of technology and Purdue University researchers have developed efficient solar cells using natural substrates derived from plants such as trees.
Just as importantly by fabricating them on cellulose nanocrystal (CNC) substrates the solar cells can be recycled quickly in water at the end of their lifecycle.
and slash and burn agriculture have taken their toll on the forests where these tree-dwelling primates live.
and pelletized calcium silicate mineral called wollastonite species such as red spruce and sugar maple experienced improved cold hardiness
and less seedling mortality in areas where calcium was applied. When Green reviewed the long-term data several years later he found something surprising about the 1999 study:
#Peach genome offers insights into breeding strategies for biofuels cropsrapidly growing trees like poplars and willows are candidate biofuel crops from
and genetics of trees and scientists are turning to long-domesticated fruit trees for hints. The relationship between a peach and a poplar may not be obvious at first glance
but to botanists both trees are part of the rosid superfamily which includes not only fruit crops like apples strawberries cherries
and almonds but many other plants as well including rose that gives the superfamily its name.
The close relationship between peach and poplar trees is evident from their DNA sequence said Jeremy Schmutz head of the Plant Program at the U s. Department of energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI.
In the March 24 edition of Nature Genetics Schmutz and several colleagues were part of the International Peach Genome Initiative (IPGI) that published the 265-million base genome of the Lovell variety of Prunus persica.
and sustainability of peach and other important tree species but also to enhance our understanding of the basic biology of trees the team wrote.
For bioenergy researchers the size of the peach genome makes it ideal to serve as a plant model for studying genes found in related genomes such as poplar one of the DOE JGI's Plant Flagship Genomes
In theory it could be manipulated in poplar to increase the accumulation of biomass. The publication comes three years after the International Peach Genome Consortium publicly released the draft assembly of the annotated peach genome on the DOE JGI Plant portal Phytozome. net and on other websites.
Learn more about poplar and DOE JGI Plant Flagship Genomes at http://genome. jgi. doe. gov/programs/plants/flagship genomes. jsf.
The Italian government also supported this international effort including the work of first author Ignazio Verde of the Fruit tree Research Centre/Agricultural Research Council in Rome Italy.
Since Kennewick lies within a region near the heart of Washington state's $1. 5 billion apple-growing region an annual survey of fruit trees is performed by the Washington state Department of agriculture (WSDA) to look for any invading insects.
This time the surveyors discovered a crabapple tree that had been infested by a fruit fly that they couldn't identify.
and accurately figuring out which one of the flies was in that tree says Jeffrey Feder professor of biological sciences
The correct identification of the larvae infesting crabapple trees saved the local state and federal agencies thousands of dollars in monitoring inspection and control costs Yee said.
As they migrate A. rudis--a reddish ant with light-colored legs--displace Aphaenogaster picea a dark ant with dark legs.
A. picea thrive at temperatures about 2 C colder than A. rudis can tolerate. Aphaenogaster ants are the dominant woodland seed dispersers in eastern forests.
So it's possible that the displacement of A. picea may affect the spread of seeds produced by early spring ephemerals said Warren. By comparing data collected in 1974 to current data Warren
and A. picea at different elevations in the Southern Appalachian mountains in Georgia. In 1974 A. rudis accounted for less than 60 percent of the two species at 500 meters and less than 20 percent at 700 meters.
but A. rudis can tolerate a higher minimum temperature than A. picea. The cold-tolerant A. picea are viable
as long as minimum temperature is at least-0. 5 C; A. rudis requires a minimum temperature of 2. 0 C as the minimum temperature rises the warm-tolerant A. rudis can migrate to higher elevations displacing A. picea.
This suggests that rising temperatures may not necessarily kill or stress species directly said Warren . Instead it might be that higher minimum temperatures allow warm-adapted species to outcompete cold-adapted species
. Because A. picea break dormancy at cooler temperatures than A. rudis they become active earlier in the spring when certain forest ephemerals such as Erythronium americanum (trout lilies) bloom.
The absence of A. picea may affect the spread of seeds produced by early-flowering woodland plants.
#Hunting for meat impacts on rainforest, fruit tree seed dispersalhunting for meat in the African rainforests has halved the number of primates.
The decline in the number of primates causes a reduction in the dispersal of seed by the primates and this leads to a reduction in the numbers of important fruit trees and changes to the rainforest.
but without felling any trees said Ola Olsson a researcher at thedepartment of Biology Lund University.
If fewer fruit seeds are spread fewer fruit trees will grow in the forests. Instead species with wind-dispersed seeds will most likely take over.
Many of the trees which have seeds that are dispersed by primates are also important to people
because primates cannot live in a forest without fruit trees. Ola Olsson would like to see better protection for nature reserves and national parks and better information and education of local people in the villages.
The trees also have other ecosystem functions in the form of carbon sequestration and effects on nutrient cycling and retention.
when the composition of the tree species changes there will be a knock-on effect on these processes.
#Record simulations conducted on Lawrence Livermore supercomputerresearchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have performed record simulations using all 1572864 cores of Sequoia the largest supercomputer in the world.
Sequoia based on IBM Bluegene/Q architecture is the first machine to exceed one million computational cores.
High performance computers such as Sequoia enable these codes to follow the simultaneous evolution of tens of billions to trillions of individual particles in highly complex systems.
Using this code Fiuza demonstrated excellent scaling in parallel performance of OSIRIS to the full 1. 6 million cores of Sequoia.
OSIRIS is used routinely for fundamental science during the test phase of Sequoia in simulations with up to 256000 cores.
Sequoia is a National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) machine developed and fielded as part of NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program.
Sequoia is preparing to move to classified computing in support of stockpile stewardship. This historic calculation is an impressive demonstration of the power of high-performance computing to advance our scientific understanding of complex systems said Bill Goldstein LLNL's deputy director for Science and Technology.
--which includes crop residues like wheat straw switchgrass whole trees and wood waste. This drop in fuel is designed to be a direct replacement for gasoline
when harvesting trees in an attempt to preserve local biodiversity. Agroforestry addresses this need through the intentional management of shade trees alongside agricultural crops.
Despite the technical differences both systems provide an intermediary between unlogged forest and intensively managed land.
They also provide habitat for tree-dependent species outside the forest as well as increased connectivity for forest species within landscapes.
Once the apples from the first tree are picked it is a rational decision to move on to the next tree he says.
#Scientists map genome of fungus that causes Dutch elm diseaseresearchers from the University of Toronto and Sickkids Research Institute announced today that they have mapped successfully the genes in the fungus that causes Dutch elm disease.
The findings published in this week's online journal BMC Genomics could help scientists figure out how to prevent the fungus from destroying elm trees in the future.
Essentially Dutch elm disease is caused by a fungus that prevents the normal distribution of nutrients in the tree by blocking the flow of sap said Alan Moses an Assistant professor with the University of Toronto's department of Cell & Systems Biology one of the authors of the study.
The tree wilts and eventually dies. Relatively little is known about the fungus that causes Dutch elm disease
and speedup research on this fungus--it's only a matter of time before most the elm trees are gone.
It is the most destructive elm tree disease in North america and typically kills most trees within two years of infection.
#Logging debris gives newly planted Douglas-fir forests a leg-upthe downed limbs and other woody debris that are inevitable byproducts of timber harvest could be among the most important components of postharvest landscapes according to a new study led by the U s. Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station.
and indirectly increase the growth rate of Douglas-fir seedlings replanted after harvest. The findings which are among the first to speak to the benefits of second-growth logging debris are published online in the journal Forest Ecology and Management.
This means that just leaving typical levels of debris in place after forest harvesting helps new Douglas-fir seedlings to become established.
In addition to having a vegetation control effect the retained woody debris helped promote Douglas-fir seedling growth by reducing evaporation;
#Monsoon failure key to long droughts in Southwestlong-term droughts in the Southwestern North america often mean failure of both summer and winter rains according to new tree-ring research from a University
This is the first time researchers have used tree rings to take a closer look at the monsoon in a large and important area of the American Southwest said Griffin who also is an EPA STAR Research Fellow at the UA Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.
Because winter precipitation has the strongest influence on annual tree growth previous large-scale long-term tree-ring reconstructions of the region's precipitation history had focused only on the winter rainy season.
The team's research report North american monsoon precipitation reconstructed from tree-ring latewood is scheduled for publication March 11 in Geophysical Research Letters a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
Additional UA co-authors are David M. Meko Holly L. Faulstich Carlos Carrillo Ramzi Touchan Christopher L. Castro and Steven W. Leavitt.
Until recently most tree-ring researchers known as dendrochronologists have looked at the total width of trees'annual rings to reconstruct past climate.
To figure out the region's past history of monsoon precipitation the scientists needed to measure latewood from tree-ring samples stored in the archives of the UA Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research
and go into the field to take additional samples of tree rings. The team looked at annual growth rings from two different species Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) and ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) throughout the weather forecast region called North american Monsoon Region 2 or NAM2.
In all the researchers used samples from 50 to 100 trees at each of 53 different sites throughout southwestern North america.
The team's climate analyses focused on NAM2 which covers most of Arizona western New mexico and northern parts of the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua.
Griffin said It was a massive undertaking--we employed about 15 undergraduates over a four-year period to measure almost 1 million tree rings.
Another would be using tree-ring reconstructions of the Southwest's fire histories to see how wildfires are related to summer precipitation.
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